Democrats held their conventions in North Carolina in 2012 and Pennsylvania in 2016 – and went on to lose each of those states in the fall.

Republicans held their conventions in Minnesota in 2008 and Florida in 2012 – and went on to lose each of those states in the fall.

But the choice of Milwaukee over Houston and Miami is loaded with political significance because of the message Democrats are sending with that selection.

This will be the first Democratic convention in the Midwest since 1996. It will come four years after the party’s narrow but devastating presidential defeat in Wisconsin, a state that Democrat Hillary Clinton failed to visit during the general election campaign. Wisconsin is one of three “blue wall” battlegrounds that after years of voting Democratic were captured by Republican Donald Trump, propelling him to the White House.

Alex Lasry, chairman of the Milwaukee 2020 DNC Convention Bid Committee, speaks as the committee held a news conference Aug. 28, 2018, at the Fiserv Forum Atrium to preview the Democratic National Committee's site visit to the city.(Photo: Mike De Sisti, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Conventions are very long and expensive campaign ads – platforms for a party and its candidate to say the things they want to say to the voters they want to say them to.

By holding their convention in Milwaukee, Democrats are saying several things.

They’re saying that retaking Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania is a core strategic priority. Those three states had voted Democratic for president at least six times in a row before 2016. Had they voted Democratic in 2016, Trump would not be president. If Democrats retake all three of these states in 2020 – and nothing else on the map changes – they will win the White House.

A good case can be made that Wisconsin is the most challenging of these three battlegrounds for Democrats and that in a very close election it could be the “tipping point” state that puts the winning party over the top in capturing an electoral majority. If it’s not the most important state next year, it’s one of the top three or four. The blue wall states are not the only path to victory that Democrats will pursue in 2020; there is a southern track that targets Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. But it’s the easiest, most winnable path.

Democrats also are saying with their convention pick that they are not content to lose rural and blue-collar white voters by ever-bigger margins, since those voters make up a huge segment of the electorate in the blue wall states. Historically, Democrats have done better with these kinds of voters in these particular states than they have done nationally. But Clinton lost rural and blue-collar whites by far bigger margins in Wisconsin than Barack Obama did in 2008 or 2012.

In Wisconsin, blue-collar (non-college) white males now lean Republican in their party identification by a margin of 24 points, according to polling data compiled by Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll. In 2012, they leaned Republican by a margin of just eight points.

Trump won Wisconsin mainly because he made massive inroads in small, blue-collar towns. Former GOP Gov. Scott Walker improved his own dominant performance in small towns and rural counties in 2018, even while he was losing ground in the cities and suburbs on his way to statewide defeat. Democrats can afford to lose blue-collar and rural white voters in Wisconsin, but when they lose them by the kind of landslide margins they did to Trump and Walker, it gives them little margin for error and is usually a recipe for defeat.

These voters are not monolithically pro-Trump. Even in 2016, exit polls showed that 50 percent of non-college white voters in Wisconsin had an unfavorable opinion of Trump. In a Marquette poll this January, the president’s approval rating among non-college whites – his demographic base – was a modest 48 percent.

Since many of these voters have mixed feelings about Trump, the “right” Democratic candidate could plausibly improve on Clinton’s dismal performance with these voters in these Great Lakes battlegrounds. That makes a concerted outreach to working-class voters in the industrial Midwest a very reasonable strategy for the party. It wasn’t that long ago that Obama performed well with these voters. And in 2018, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin won 17 “Trump counties” in Wisconsin and lost non-college whites statewide by only five points after running a campaign that combined economic populism, parochial Wisconsin themes, health care advocacy and heavy outreach outside the cities.

In addition to being political platforms for the parties, conventions also are used by the national media to tell political stories and shape political narratives.

A Wisconsin convention will conjure up a different blend of political themes and stories than a Texas or Florida convention would have.

Here's one big one: the erosion of Democratic support across rural America and among white voters without college degrees, which led to the remarkable number (more than 500) of Wisconsin communities that voted for both Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. Add in the issues surrounding Trump’s trade policies and the painful struggles of dairy and crop farmers in Wisconsin, and the electoral plot thickens.

But there are plenty of other stories to tell.

Wisconsin is a microcosm of the fierce political battle for America’s suburbs. It has very blue suburbs (around Madison), very red suburbs (outside Milwaukee County) and an economically diverse collection of purple suburbs around the state. The most Republican of these communities have historically provided the GOP its political base in Wisconsin, but the Republican performance in the suburbs slipped for both Trump in 2016 and Walker in 2018. The suburban vote will be just as important as the rural vote in Wisconsin in 2020.

Another story is the African-American vote in Milwaukee. Hillary Clinton’s failure to match Obama’s Milwaukee turnout hurt her in 2016. But it was hardly a surprise, and it wasn’t the leading factor in her Wisconsin defeat (the massive rural swing in the state had a much bigger impact). Last year, on the other hand, big Democratic margins in Milwaukee helped defeat Walker.

On the Republican side, Wisconsin is the most striking example of a party that has wrestled with its relationship to Trump. GOP voters here rejected him soundly in the state’s 2016 primary. Then they coalesced enough in the general election to help Trump breach the blue wall. Today, while the vast majority of GOP voters in this state approve of the job the president is doing, a significant fraction has qualms, and that is one more X factor in 2020.

Finally, Wisconsin continues to exemplify two of the defining attributes of today’s political culture.

This is one of the most politically mobilized and engaged states in America. (It was anywhere from second to fourth in the U.S. in turnout last year, depending on how you measure it.)

And it is one of the most polarized. It is struggling with divided government, as is Washington. And its voters are deeply divided along party lines.

Next year, when the Democrats arrive to nominate a presidential candidate, Wisconsin will be a fitting backdrop to the turbulent politics of the Trump Era.

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